Saturday, August 14, 2004

Good morning everyone. This is a webcam picture of Queen Anne hill, near where I live, at 9 this morning. You can't actually see my apartment, but I circled the general area to give you guys an idea. Tim and I live right at the base of Queen Anne, with a some great views of Lake Union. Pretty sweet, except for the motorcycles and cars flying down I-99, a nearby highway, at 100 miles an hour, honking, possibly because they are being chased by ninjas.

Some may wonder what might compel someone to wake up at 8:30 on Saturday, especially when my typical routine would be to sleep in until 10. Not only did I wake up at 8:30, I actually walked down 2 blocks from where I live. (Although it may not surprise you that there are actually TWO Starbucks within a 2 block radius) In fact, I am blogging right now on the free WiFi of some poor sap who didn't enable WEP on his wireless router.

The reason why I'm conscious and walking around rather than drooling into my pillow at this moment, is because I am starting to work on a new media search project. Since I don't have nearly enough time every week to get it done, so I need to start squeezing all my extra time out. This means waking up early on the weekend so I have most of the day to work on this project.

I'll write some more about why I am crazy enough to spend my time tinkering instead of sleeping/biking/jogging/otherwise enjoying myself in the next couple days.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Economists predict Olympic medal distribution: a bunch of tools at PriceWaterhouseCoopers have developed a model that they claim accounts for 90% of variation in national medal winning. Their model claims that various economic statistics can explain virtually all of this variation. Consequently, the model predicts that the US and Russia will come out on top again, but not as dominantly as in past Olympics. I offer an alternative predictive model - I call it the KISS Principal Olympic model, and it goes a little like this: USA! USA! USA! Seriously, though, the more interesting implication of this model that (gasp!) the Slate article brushes past is that, while the US and other rich countries are getting richer, poorer countries are getting richer faster. And good for them - the more money have, the more of our ridiculous crap they can buy. Yeah, capitalism!

Infectious Greed: Paying for Top Venture CapitalistsHow much are entrepreneurs willing to pay to get the most prestigious venture capital firms as investors in their firms? According to a paper by David Hsu in the August issue of the Journal of Finance, they are willing to accept valuation discounts on the order of 10-14%. Ah, so true, but working with the right VC firm is very important--one that you can work well with and bring in top management.

Actually, this is a picture I took in the San Juan islands when I visited last year with my girlfriend.

I'm really testing BloggerBot, the photo thing - it's actually pretty cool. It integrates completely with blogger.com, and all I have to do is pick a picture on my hard drive, and it'll resize it, upload it, and host it. Pretty amazing. You guys should try it out.

Today is the beginning of a new era for this blog. No longer am I going to be content posting links without comments. Instead, I will actually get off of my lazy ass and start blogging about real issues that people care about. Think 60 Minutes, but 40 years younger, on fire, going 1000 miles an hour, being chased by alien ninja warriors with blaster guns.

Deception Detection: Science News Online, July 31, 2004 "Is he lying?" Odds are, you'll never know. Although people have been communicating with one another for tens of thousands of years, more than 3 decades of psychological research have found that most individuals are abysmally poor lie detectors. In the only worldwide study of its kind, scientists asked more than 2,000 people from nearly 60 countries, "How can you tell when people are lying?" From Botswana to Belgium, the number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze.